Hot Spots, Soft Spots and Bald Spots

by Madeleine Kando

The English language is really good at turning words into versatile tools that can be used for many purposes, like a Swiss army knife. Take the humble little word spot, for instance. With a snap of our fingers, we can make a spot become hot, sweet, tight, bald, cold, dead, soft or blind. And those are just the noun words. We can ‘be spot on’, an adjective, ‘hit the spot’, a direct object, or ‘spot something a mile off’, a verb. We have a knack for breathing life into language by dressing up simple words and send them out into the world to work their magic.

But why stop there? A single one of these ‘compound nouns’ can, itself, take on different meanings. A spot can be hot, but a hotspot can be a place of unusual popularity, a spot where volcanic magma rises through the earth’s crust, an area of political or civil unrest, a place where a wireless Internet connection is available and more recently a place where the Coronavirus is particularly active.

When I drove down dreary Route 9 in Newton the other day, I didn’t think it was unusually popular and there was no magma in sight. My phone didn’t detect a wireless connection and since I didn’t have a dog in the car, I couldn’t check for its infected skin rash.

But I knew I was entering a hotspot. This is the spot where the month before my car had been rear-ended. As I was waiting at the traffic light, I could feel the heat through the floor of the car. I breathed a sigh of relief when the light turned green, but a while later on the highway, my knuckles around the steering wheel turned white. I was approaching another hot spot where not too long ago, I almost flipped my car, when I collided with a ladder that had fallen off the back of a truck.

So you see, as time goes on, it gets harder to find any spots on my way home that are not marred with bad memories. Some spots are so hot, that driving through them is too painful. Many years ago, I found my daughter in a diabetic coma, unconscious on the floor of her dorm. I have tried to rub that spot off, but it just won’t come out, even after all these years. That is definitely a dead zone, in my book.

Is that why people move? Why they emigrate? Isn’t there a need in most people’s lives to trash all those hot spots on one’s mental map and start fresh, like a spring-cleaning.

I am lucky. I moved a lot during my early years, from Hungary to France, then to Holland and finally to the United States. I started my life here with a nice virgin map. No spots of any kind covering this beautiful country. Then I lived my life and like raindrops splashing on a car window, the hotspots prevented me from looking out onto the world. Windshield wipers didn’t help at all after a while.

But what am I whining about? My spots are small potatoes compared to what others must be carrying around.

Here is a picture of the Red Zone in northern France, where so much fighting went on during World War 1, that it was declared uninhabitable until this very day. With the amount of human and animal remains, unexploded mines and deadly chemicals, farming and construction are not allowed by the authorities. Did the lucky ones that survived ever choose to go back to visit or did they choose to forget?

It’s just that everyone has only one life to live, one mental map to navigate through life. Historians always go by real maps when they write about battles, floods and earthquakes. But what about the musty, faded maps in people’s heads, splashed all over with hot spots? We have to lug them around, year in year out, until we die. Then, finally the map is wiped clean.

Before you call me a glass half empty kind of person, I will tell you about the soft spots on my map. I have a soft spot for the dunes in Holland where I got my first kiss, for the beauty of Kauai, the oldest island in the Hawaiian chain, for the roasted chestnut vendors in Paris and for the open prairies of Montana.

But most of the map is covered with bald spots, places that have I never been. That even includes my local supermarket. At the risk of being branded a snob, I confess that the soft drink and frozen food isles are foreign territory to me. Maybe now that we are all on lockdown because of the virus, I could satisfy my sense of adventure and start exploring those isles.

See if you can spot the Swiss army knife in action:

‘Yesterday I was driving on the highway to the hottest spot in town, when I got stuck in traffic and hit a trouble spot. So I decided to take a short cut, but because of the blind spot in my mirror, I crashed into the car behind me. Now the shit hit the fan. I was in a real tight spot. It was dark and suddenly a spot light shone in my face. This burly State trooper put me on the spot. I was really in a spot of trouble, seeing that it was my husband’s car that I had just crashed. He had been spot on when he had warned me not to take his car. After all the paperwork, I drove to this bar for which I had a real soft spot. With the entire crowd out front, you can spot it a mile off. The 10 Mai Tai's I drank before I fell off the bar stool, really hit the spot.’

The word hotspot is so hot these days, that many languages don’t even bother having a word of their own. They swallowed it whole. A German will say ‘Die neue Bar ist der Hotspot in der Stadt’. But the French, purists as they are call a favorite hotspot ‘une destination importante’.

‘Would you like to go for a drink tonight? I know this new important destination in town.’ Nah, that doesn’t cut it. leave comment here